1. Here’s a good ‘long read’ for the weekend from our correspondent in Ecuador, the first piece in a series for The New Yorker by Jay Caspian Kang, Will A.I. Make College Obsolete? https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/will-ai-make-college-obsolete

A few weeks ago, while I was dealing with taxes, it occurred to me that the money my wife and I were putting away in a college fund for our children might be better used somewhere else. This wasn’t a novel musing, but it felt particularly pressing as I watched my account balance go down, a portion of its resources funnelled into something that can’t be touched for at least the next nine years. When my nine-year-old daughter graduates from high school, in 2035, I asked myself, will the landscape of higher education look the way that it does now? Will it still be as expensive? Do I actually need to squirrel away money for tuition, or should I just put what I have into a stable-growth account so that later I can cash it in to buy her an apartment, an iPhone, and whatever other tools she needs to deal with a world governed by our coming A.I. robot masters?

2. Here’s the Ipsos Generations Report for 2026, Continuity vs rupture https://ipsos-insight-llc.foleon.com/ipsos-thinks/ipsos-generations-report-2026/ and here’s a recording of the event at which it was presented https://www.ipsos.com/en/replay-keys-ipsos-generations-report

Continuity and rupture are pervasive themes throughout this year’s Ipsos Generations Report. Drastic change is on the horizon. Population decline is now a mathematical certainty, with impending consequences for governments, societies and businesses. In 19 of the world’s 20 largest economies, the number of children a woman has in her lifetime is now below the level needed to replace the population – and it’s set to fall even further. How can businesses continue to grow in a world with fewer and fewer people to buy their products and services? Longstanding demographic changes and a developing trend of economic stresses are also disrupting the traditional life cycle. Enter a new set of modern milestones, as young people postpone traditional independence and older people enjoy a longer period of post-retirement life, while the middle-aged find themselves squeezed on both sides.

3. Sakina Jafri’s reflections on attending the UKFIET conference, Rooms we inhabit: positionality, belonging and becoming as an ECR https://www.ukfiet.org/2026/rooms-we-inhabit-positionality-belonging-and-becoming-as-an-ecr/

Positionality has never felt like an abstract concept to me. It is lived, felt, and carried into every space I enter. As a brown Pakistani American woman, a former primary school teacher, a mother, and now a doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, my identities are multiple, intersecting, and constantly evolving. They do not grant me authority to speak for others, but they shape how I listen, how I relate, and how I engage. Writing as an early career researcher (ECR), this reflection traces how my positionality shaped my research with South Asian heritage teachers and how it further unsettled and sharpened my experience at the UKFIET conference. It explores the tensions between language and action, belonging and critique, and asks what accountability and reflexivity demand of us as emerging scholars.

Lots more on the UKFIET blog here https://www.ukfiet.org/blog/

4. Beyond Cognitive Load Theory: Why Learning Can’t Be Reduced to Memory Management is the latest post by Peter Ellerton on his The Education Contrarian blog https://peterellerton.substack.com/p/beyond-cognitive-load-theory

For the last decade or so, Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has come to occupy a privileged position in educational influence. Often presented as the Science of Learning, CLT promises simplicity and clarity in a field plagued by fads. Minimise extraneous load, manage intrinsic load, and optimise germane load, all in the service of efficient schema acquisition. In an educational ecosystem increasingly obsessed with “what works”, this message has been irresistible. But the practice of education and conceptual simplicity rarely travel far together …

5. And, finally, the Alveus Sanctuary virtual education centre, which has a 24/7 live stream on Twitch “where viewers can watch the animal ambassadors, get to know them and gain an appreciation for their species” https://www.alveussanctuary.org/